Apparently the start of the game is really flaky, but it improves after the first mission and you can start stealthing your way around.

In other news, I killed a dragon on the way to work this morning. I really missed playing Skyrim every day over the holidays. And yeah, I know I could have, but I never did.

In other other news, I've nearly got my gaming room sorted. I've got the Xbone, PS3, Switch, PSTV (so I can play on the PS4, even though it's in the other room) and original Xbox (with every emulator ever) up and running. I'm running out of shelf space to set up the others, but I think other than the PS2 I'm not missing much. I have the PS1, Saturn, Wii, N64, DC and 360 in the loft still. Perhaps the DC needs setting up. And maybe the 360 for Skate 2, as only Skate 3 is backwards compatible on the Bone. I'm using a fairly old TV though, and it's got a real problem with a lack of inputs. I'm using an HDMI switcher, but barely any of those consoles work with HDMI.

Finally, in the last other other news, this was our New Year's Day project this year... just got it finished before coming back to work:

Now I need to decide whether to put it back in the box, or stick it on the wall in the games room. I've never had a puzzle on the wall before, but this one is awesome.

Woah okay i've gone back and read what the rest of you thought of TLJ. And obviously I completed disagree with the Italian crew. Rogue One was shit. There, I said it. Completely forgettable characters, and the whole death star plan capture story was done better by Dark Forces in 1995. CONTROVERSIAL? Actually most of the Birmingham crew (uh, people you've never met - oh except I invited them to do a Dead Mines run once in 2005!) think the same. Maybe it's a Midlands thing? Though we do love the fact that the actor who played Jyn (?) is a Brummie! She grew up just down the road in Bournville! That was the best thing about Rogue One.

Still looking forward to SOLO obv.

WEll I'm from Birmingham and I liked Rogue One and TLJ. Solo will probably be shit though

In other news, I'm considering getting a Switch, which would be my first Nintendo console EVER. But do I really play games enough any more to justify it?

So, I already said some of this to Rev and Fien, but wtf @ Rockstar games.

I'm not sure why Rockstar are immune to all the micro transaction bullshit that is prevalent in (gaming) news right now. But they might even be the pioneers of it.. How old is GTA V now? 2013? Hell have Rockstar even made a game since GTA V? I'm wondering if they stopped bothering making games because they make so much money out of GTA micro transactions. And it makes me worried for RDR2. (Not that I am any sort of fan of RDR since I barely played it).

But anyway, the GTA Online experience.. First of all, almost every job I get offered requires a facility, or an office, or a clubhouse, or some shit I don't even know about which all costs upwards of a million dollars. The jobs I'm doing right now pay 9-15k. So to unlock these jobs that they are literally spamming me with every few minutes of playing, I would need to successfully run 80 or more of those jobs. And that's just to unlock them.

I can also expect, judging by some of the missions we've seen lately, that the new jobs are bloody difficult unless you buy some serious kit. I was looking online to how people do the headhunter VIP mission that Fien and I tried the other day, and the general consensus was that you buy an armoured weaponised car that I forget the name of but might have been an Insurgent. Which costs 900k. Or 700k after you successfully completed some heist or something.

This game is pure pay to win. Obviously it's not really, because you don't have to do any of the stuff in PvP if you don't want to. You can also grind everything really slowly. I could do 70 jobs and buy that armoured car with a machine gun turret. I might even do that eventually. But Jesus, it really is of little surprise to me that buying GTA cash is popular.

The flip side of this argument is all the DLC that GTA Online has had and continues to get. It's all free and rockstar has to make money somehow. (Obviously a lot of games have DLC and ongoing support and don't take more of your money but I suppose it's the norm.) The trouble is, as far as I can see, GTA Online simply isn't very good. In fact it's pretty terrible. It wouldn't be a vary good game at all except for the fun and possibilities there are with your friends in the World they created. All the DLC seems to be pretty crap (not that I'd know because it's all locked behind those paywalls unless you grind for months) by all accounts and what the DLC actually does is add more and more over powered and over priced mchinery to the game.

The headhunter mission that I was talking about earlier that I tried with Fien, try finding it on youtube. There's hundreds of videos and almost all of them are people using a helicopter gunship. Those start around 3.5 million dollars by the way.

Again, to be fair, I found a guy who could do it. He certainly had a better in car weapon than me. I might look into that because right now I have a manual pistol for in car stuff. He had some kind of fully automatic weapon.

Interestingly (or perhaps not) he got 21.5k for doing the job. Which wasn't a whole lot more than we got for failing it the other day? Fien might even have gotten about that much in total since he got bodyguard pay on top..

So 3.5 million for a helicopter gunship divided by 21.5k = 163 headhunter missions when you're up for it Fien.